Social marketing platform Unified gets more Yammer-like

As Microsoft’s $1 billion acquisition of Yammer showed us, there’s an appetite for social media products tailored for the enterprise. And with several new enhancements rolled out Wednesday, Unified wants to be even more of an enterprise-grade communication and social operating platform specifically for marketers.

Launched in January, Unified offers cloud-based technology to help brands and agencies execute social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and other social channels through a centralized dashboard. Its “social operating platform” is like a one-stop-shop for social media advertising that streamlines each step of the process — from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment. Last month, the company said it raised $14 million in a round led by Advance Publications Inc., the company that owns Condé Nast Publications.

On Wednesday, the company released an updated version of the platform that layers on a Yammer-like user experience to the workflow specific to a brand or agency executing multiple social media campaigns.

With the new version, everyone from the campaign manager to the CMO can communicate about new campaign dates, data sets, creative content, comments and more, as well as manage tasks and receive Facebook-like notifications for the information most relevant to them.

“The one thing we wanted to take into consideration was serving up the right information to the right people,” said Jason Beckerman, co-founder and chief product officer.

The latest version also makes it easier for brands to see the global picture of all of their marketing campaigns (from those on social media to more traditional TV campaigns) and monitor how they’re interacting, as well as visualize all the relevant datasets (from those showing campaign performance to those revealing social media commentary about campaigns) in one place.

The company also released Amplet, a new app that allows an advertiser or publisher to turn banner ads, landing pages and other kinds of web content into shareable and trackable content. For example, Beckerman said a recent client was able to work with a set of bloggers and turn specific parts of their posts into content visitors could tweet and it allowed the client to track the virality with more granularity. Unified said Amplet was the first of more apps developed by the company and third parties. Considering that the company’s latest investor owns Condé Nast’s glossy titles it’s reasonable to assume that web content for those magazines could soon start adopting this technology.

Since launching, the company has managed more than than 3,000 campaigns for more than 200 brands, and has added several new executives from the enterprise and marketing communities. Social media management platforms, such as Buddy Media and Vitrue, also let brands manage their social campaigns, but Unified’s pitch is that it focuses on paid and earned media and provides a more comprehensive platform.